Creative Team Building and Leadership Resources - In our Elements

Are My Hands Clean?

Tuesday, June 7th, 2011

Fellow Passengers: This week’s Promise Passage* (Genesis 4:1-16) transports me to an age-old land-use battle between the shepherd and the farmer, this one being the archetypal epic featuring a First Family feud between big brother Cain and baby brother Abel. This story, the genesis of fratricide, mirrors the history that was being written across the Fertile Crescent 10,000 years ago, as the shepherds and hunter-gatherers of the land were being slaughtered by the ever-expanding agriculturalists, whose farming practices led to their needing more and more land to cultivate. God’s rejection of Cain’s offering was a prophetic rejection of this kind of wholesale genocide that came with the “progress” of settled farming, which, according to Jared Diamond, was the worst mistake in the history of the human race. Were Jared Diamond a theologian rather than an anthropologist, he would say that the control and engineering of nature for the purpose of creating surplus food was outside of God’s plan, it was the sin crouching at Cain’s door, and if he had only had the faith and courage to trust God to provide, as Abel did, he would be accepted. But Cain and his factory farm descendants were too invested in industry, too caught up in playing God rather than trusting God, to go back.

It all winds up being the first episode of Murder She Wrote, and the only witness is the blood-soaked earth crying out, the earth which opened up to receive Abel’s blood from Cain’s hand. Cain is banned from the farming business, doomed to wander the earth, protected by a mark that will prevent further killing in the fields. So Cain lived out his days in the land of Wandering (in Hebrew, Nod). It’s a fascinating story, filled with vivid imagery. Bloody hands, bloody earth, the fertile crescent becoming a bloody red crescent. As the song says, there was blood on the scarecrow, blood on the plow. This story of blood-stained hands reminds me of a story sung by the a cappella group, Sweet Honey in the Rock. I’ll leave you with the full set of lyrics, which speak of the kind of curse foreshadowed in the Cain story and analyzed in Jared Diamond’s work. It speaks to the interwoven network of land and labor and blood we all rely on to simply buy our clothes at a discount price. The song ends with the question we can all ask, and since we are all descendants of Cain, we know the answer.

I wear garments touched by hands from all over the world 35% cotton, 65% polyester, the journey begins in Central America in the cotton fields of El Salvador. In a province soaked in blood, pesticide-sprayed workers toil in a broiling sun pulling cotton for two dollars a day. Then we move on up to another rung—Cargill, a top-forty trading conglomerate, takes the cotton through the Panama Canal up the Eastern seaboard, coming to the US of A for the first time. In South Carolina at the Burlington mills the cotton joins a shipment of polyester filament courtesy of the New Jersey petro-chemical mills of Dupont. Dupont strands of filament begin in the South American country of Venezuela where oil riggers bring up oil from the earth for six dollars a day. Then Exxon, largest oil company in the world, upgrades the product in the country of Trinidad and Tobago, then back into the Caribbean and Atlantic Seas to the factories of Dupont, on the way to the Burlington mills in South Carolina to meet the cotton from the blood-soaked fields of El Salvador. In South Carolina Burlington factories hum with the business of weaving oil and cotton into miles of fabric for Sears who takes this bounty back into the Caribbean Sea headed for Haiti this time—May she be one day soon free—Far from the Port-au-Prince palace third world women toil doing piece work to Sears specifications for three dollars a day. My sisters make my blouse. It leaves the third world for the last time coming back into the sea to be sealed in plastic for me—this third world sister. And I go to the Sears department store where I buy my blouse on sale for 20% discount. Are my hands clean?

How about you? Where does this Promise Passage take you on your journey of faith? Feel free to comment.

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  • Genesis 4:1-16

    *Today's Passage

    Now the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, ‘I have produced a man with the help of the Lord.’ Next she bore his brother Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a tiller of the ground. In the course of time Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel for his part brought of the firstlings of his flock, their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell. The Lord said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.’

    Cain said to his brother Abel, ‘Let us go out to the field.’ And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him. Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel?’ He said, ‘I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?’ And the Lord said, ‘What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground! And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you its strength; you will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.’ Cain said to the Lord, ‘My punishment is greater than I can bear! Today you have driven me away from the soil, and I shall be hidden from your face; I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me may kill me.’ Then the Lord said to him, ‘Not so! Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.’ And the Lord put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him. Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord, and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

      –Genesis 4:1-16, NRSV